Tipping points

How does a pitch go from ‘interesting’ to ‘let’s run this, right now?’ To be honest, this is not a science. There’s rarely a single reason why a journalist might go for something with legs one week and not another – a collection tends to be the case. An obvious one is the ‘why now.’ If you’ve been trying to land coverage around full body MRI scanners for months to no avail, and suddenly a celebrity undergoes one and posts about it, of course your emails are far more likely to get panicked replies including phrases like ‘could the founder speak today?’

Another is if a particular topic readers love has not been covered much lately. If all has been quiet on the longevity front recently, and a pitch in that category appears, there’s a bigger chance of ears pricking up than if a glut of pitches on that same topic are percolating.

But the big one, for me at least, is when something hits a tipping point. Take the example of weight loss drugs like Ozempic. These had been prescribed for a while without making too much of a splash, before becoming wildly popular over the past couple of years. More and more people started taking them, they moved from ‘celebrity red carpet secret’ to something your friends might be on, and we saw they had remarkable results, resulting in a tornado of media coverage. It didn’t stop there: there were stories to be had around side effects, like impacts on cravings for alcohol and cigarettes and even exploring a possible link between the drugs and a reduced risk of dementia.

Another example of a tipping point is when multiple treatments for a common health concern all go into advanced clinical trials at the same time, or when something slides from the fringes of the Internet into the mainstream, like past examples of biohacking and looksmaxxing.

Like I say, there is no perfect formula for getting a pitch to land at a certain point. There’s a few things you can look to, though, to help inform when is the right time to try and get something over the line.